Sunday, So Out To Lunch,

as a kid Sunday was always a special day, in the early 1950's Dad and Grandad would wander off down to the club and bring back a selection of seafood, crab, prawns, shrimps, some times jellied eels and of course heaps of mussells and whelks, with bread and butter followed by a snooze in the afternoon, later when we had television the afternoon film was favorite, so keeping to the tradition of keeping Sunday a special day we were off, but first stop to the Kodak shop to get some paperwork for the bike encapsulated,

before going to the Robin's Nest, there were not so many people there to day, but for us the good news is that the rain had stopped so at least we arrived dry,

beef madras for me, 'Cheers!'

and a Thia dish for Diana, both excellent, then home for a few zzzz's, must keep up the family tradition! a quick play with the stamps and we were set for the evening,

I guess pretty much everyone will have seen some part of The Shining, it was featured on one of the Simpson episodes we watched a few days ago, which is why I thought of watching it again, for anyone that has not seen the film a man, his son and wife become the winter caretakers of an isolated hotel where Danny, the son, sees disturbing visions of the hotel's past using a telepathic gift known as "The Shining", the father, Jack Torrance, is underway in a writing project when he slowly slips into insanity as a result of cabin fever and former guests of the hotel's ghosts, although named 'The Overlook' in the book and film the hotel is actually called The Stanley Hotel, no not after me, I was not around in 1909! but Stanley of Stanley's Steamers was, in 1903 he purchased 160 acres and began to build, the hotel open in 1909, strangely enough the original version of this film was poorly received in the States so the director cut 24 minuets from it's length before releasing it in Europe, cutting totally the efforts of two actors although their names still appear in the credits,

then to an old favorite, The Third Man, an out of work pulp fiction novelist, Holly Martins, arrives in a post war Vienna (this is a great site for tracking down locations where the movie was shot in Vienna), divided into sectors by the victorious allies, and where a shortage of supplies has lead to a flourishing black market. He arrives at the invitation of an ex-school friend, Harry Lime, who has offered him a job, only to discover that Lime has recently died in a peculiar traffic accident, then the chase for truth begins, strangely enough the behind the scenes intrigue could almost be made into a film, like one of the most memorable lines in the film by Harry Lime (Orson Wlles) 'in Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance, in Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? the cuckoo clock,' all of this was not in the book, Orsen just made it up as he finished the scene, also the Swiss pointed out at the time they did not invent the cuckoo clock, another little known fact is that the author (Henry) Graham Greene based Harry Lime on a real life friend who he worked for in MI6, the traitor Kim Philby who he stayed friends with after his defection, also unlike The Shinning that had 24 minuets cut from it for European audiences the same happened to The Third Man but the other way around, 11 minuets was cut from the version released in America, it appears that American audiences at the time had to be protected from an actor playing an American drunkard, Joseph Cotten playing the part of Holly Martins, another little snippet, the grave that was dug up in the film was not a grave but it is now a real grave of a person named Grün well translated into English it is Green, the name of the author, what are the chances? after all of that we were off to bed!